Angelo State speaker to talk about engineering and evolving organisms

What can we learn from the abalone, the sea snails? A lot, if you are Angela Belcher, the 43rd Speaker for the WTMA Distinguished Lectureship in Science at Angelo State University.

Abalone inspired her to become one of the foremost scientists in the world. The sea snails grow complex strong shells and exquisite interiors of diverse shapes and sizes. They do all this by using the ingredients found in the seawater, and these ingredients are unimaginably small, measured in nanoscales.

Abalone have perfected their method over 500 million years.

"We are just borrowing from that," Belcher says about her research and discovery. In her quest to solve problems in medicine, energy and environment, she has followed nature's biological process, and has produced more than 150 different materials.

Imitating the abalone, she uses nano materials in her lab, and one of her vehicles is a virus called M13 bacteriophage, harmless to humans. It, too, is unimaginably small, just 6 nanometer in diameter and 880 nm in length. (1 nanometer is 0.000000039 inches.) She has genetically engineered the virus to form tiny wires to produce biological batteries and solar cells. But beyond that, she is striving to revolutionize the energy industry, providing safe and cheap energy.

One of the two biotechnology companies she has founded is Siluria Technologies, which converts methane, the main constituent of the natural gas, into gasoline and diesel. Her venture isn't just an ivory tower exercise. It has attracted world-wide attention, and Saudi Arabian and Brazilian energy industries have invested in her company.

She is also using the same virus to tackle an entirely different problem: cancer. Current cancer imaging techniques such as CT scan and MRI are still inadequate — they can detect a cancer only when it has grown enough in size to be visible in the scans. But by that time, it may be incurable, considering the fact that a 1 cm (0.4 inch) tumor has about 1 billion cells, and any one of them can metastasize.

Therefore, it's logical that bigger the tumor, higher the number of cells, greater the chance of spreading. So she is finding ways to diagnose and treat cancer in its earliest stage by using the M13 virus. Starting with ovarian cancer, a notoriously difficult cancer to diagnose early, she is going after two intractable malignancies, brain and pancreatic cancers.

Angela Belcher(Photo: Contributed / Angelo State University)

Belcher has dyslexia, and it has forced her to think and organize in a particular way using her sharp memory.

"It's kind of playing to your strengths, which is something I've always been a big fan of," she said.

For her achievements, she has received many accolades including MacArthur Fellowship and election to the Academy of Arts and Sciences, National Academy of Inventors, and National Academy of Engineering.

Belcher, a seventh generation Texan, grew up in Houston and San Antonio. Finishing her education at the University of California, Santa Barbara, she joined the faculty of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2002, where she is now professor of biological engineering and materials science and engineering. She is also a popular teacher.

She is married to a physician, a grade school classmate, and has two sons. Despite her daily packed schedule with the family, research and business ventures, she takes time to promote education and cochairs MIT's PK- 12 Action Group, dedicated to improving education for children around the world. "It's really going to fall to the next generation to make the most progress and solve the most challenging issues on the planet," she said.

She will give two talks on her works at the CJ Davidson Conference Center at ASU on March 26. The student lecture is at 2 p.m., and the topic is "Engineering and evolving organisms to build new materials for energy, the environment and medicine." Then the public lecture is at 7 p.m., and the topic is "A path from biologically grown batteries to finding tiny tumors: Encoding nanoscale materials for energy storage and early detection and treatment of ovarian cancer." Both presentations are open to all.

Fazlur Rahman is a longtime selection committee member of the WTMA Distinguished Lectureship in Science; an adjunct professor of biology (medical humanities and ethics) at ASU. He can be reached at frahmanmd@gmail.com.